Columbine (book)


Columbine is a non-fiction book written by Dave Cullen and published by Twelve on April 6, 2009. It is an examination of the Columbine High School massacre, on April 20, 1999, and the perpetrators Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The book covers two major storylines: the killer's evolution leading up to the attack, and the survivors' struggles with the aftermath over the next decade. Chapters alternate between the two stories. Graphic depictions of parts of the attack are included, in addition to the actual names of friends and family.
Cullen says he spent ten years researching and writing the book. He previously contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London and The Guardian. He is best known for his work for Slate and Salon.com. His Slate story "The Depressive and the Psychopath" five years earlier, offered the first diagnosis of the killers by the team of psychologists and psychiatrists brought into the case by the FBI.
Publication was timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the massacre, which occurred on April 20, 1999. The book spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list in the spring of 2009, peaking at #3.
The book gained considerable media attention for addressing many of the so-called Columbine myths widely taken for granted. According to the book, the massacre had nothing to do with school bullying, jocks, the Gothic subculture, Marilyn Manson or the Trench Coat Mafia. Cullen also writes that the attack was intended primarily as a bombing rather than a school shooting, and that Harris and Klebold intended to perpetrate the worst terrorist attack in American history. The book garnered glowing reviews from Time, Newsweek, People, The New York Observer and The New York Times Book Review. One of the few dissenting views came from Janet Maslin, who wrote in The New York Times, "What good can a new book on Columbine do? Mr. Cullen's Salon coverage had already refuted some of the worst misconceptions about the story by the fall of 1999... Emerging details mostly corroborate what was already known."
Columbine won a bevy of awards and honors, including the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Barnes & Noble's Discover Award, and the Goodreads Choice Award. It was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Audie Award and the MPIBA Regional Book Award.
Additionally, Columbine was named on two dozen Best of 2009 lists, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, iTunes and the American Library Association. It was declared Top Education Book of 2009, and one of the best of the decade by the American School Board Journal.

Development

In a 2015 Vanity Fair essay, the author described the powerful impact his mentor Lucia Berlin had on the creation of the book and on his ability to vividly portray such characters as Klebold and teacher Dave Sanders, describing Berlin as “the guiding force in my work, and my life” even long after her death.

Synopsis

Columbine has two main storylines, told in alternating chapters: the 'before' story of the killers' evolution toward murder, and the 'after' story of the survivors. There are shorter 'during' accounts, describing the attack itself, dispersed throughout the book. Formally composed of 53 chapters divided into five parts, the book also includes a timeline, 26 pages of detailed endnotes, and a fifteen-page bibliography organized into topics.
The 'before' story focuses primarily on the killers' high school years preceding the massacre. According to the experts cited on the book, Eric Harris was a textbook psychopath, and Dylan Klebold was an angry depressive.
The 'after' story is composed of eight major sub-stories, focused on individuals who played a key role in the aftermath of the attack, including Columbine Principal Frank DeAngelis, alleged Christian martyr Cassie Bernall, "the boy in the window", Patrick Ireland, FBI Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, and the families of victim Danny Rohrbough and teacher Dave Sanders, who died saving students from the gunmen. The Evangelical Christian community's feverish response to the alleged "martyrdom" issue is also chronicled.
Columbine begins four days before the massacre, at a school assembly hosted by Principal DeAngelis just before Prom weekend. Scenes from the massacre are graphically depicted in the early chapters, and later through flashbacks.

Reception

Published by Twelve on April 6, 2009, Columbine debuted at number seven on the bestseller list for The New York Times in the United States. It peaked at number three, and spent eight weeks on the list.
The book was very well received by critics, and by news media, which focused heavily on the dispelling of numerous Columbine myths, and also the extensive portrayal of the minds of the two killers. In The New York Observer, Stephen Amidon described Columbine as a "gripping study... To his credit, Mr. Cullen does not simply tear down Columbine's legends. He also convincingly explains what really sparked the murderous rage... disquieting... beautifully written."
Several critics compared the book to In Cold Blood, including former Publishers Weekly Editor-In-Chief Sara Nelson, who reviewed it for The Daily Beast and called it "a riveting read, on a par with the greatest crime analysis from In Cold Blood or The Stranger Beside Me." A debate sprang up on the issue, with some critics concurring, and others arguing that Cullen's artistry fell short of Truman Capote's.
Jennifer Senior, in The New York Times Book Review, resisted the Capote comparison, but offered high praise. She observed that: "Had Dave Cullen capitulated to cliché while writing ‘Columbine’, he would have started his tale 48 hours before Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's notorious killing spree, stopped the frame just before they fired their guns, and then spooled back to the very beginning, with the promise of trying to explain how the two boys got to this twisted pass. But he doesn't. As Cullen eventually writes, ‘there had been no trigger’ — at least none that would be satisfying to horrified outsiders, grieving parents or anyone in between. Eric Harris was a psychopath, simple as that. Dylan Klebold was a suicidally depressed kid who yoked his fate to a sadist. Instead, what intrigues the author are perceptions and misperceptions: how difficult a shooting spree is to untangle; how readily mass tragedies lend themselves to misinformation and mythologizing; how psychopaths can excel at the big con... Yet what's amazing is how much of Cullen's book still comes as a surprise. I expected a story about misfits exacting vengeance, because that was my memory of the media consensus — Columbine, right, wasn't there something going on there between goths and jocks? In fact, Harris and Klebold were killing completely at random that day. Their victims weren't the intended targets at all; the entire school was."
Janet Maslin published one of the book's few negative reviews. In the daily issue of The New York Times, Maslin wrote: "And now that books as commercially ambitious as Columbine are marketed like movies, an online video advertisement for the book touts its '10 years in the making', calling it 'the definitive story of an American tragedy'. For the same YouTube trailer, Cullen allowed himself to be filmed sitting at his desk amid potted houseplants, scrolling solemnly through a computer-screen copy of one of the killers' hate-filled journals."
Maslin wrote, "But Mr. Cullen has not written this book solely to dissect the events of Columbine. He also invites his readers to relive them. So he replays the planning and execution of the killings for maximum dramatic impact, trying to get right inside the killers' heads."
Newsweek essay by Ramin Satoodeh stated: "In the decade since Columbine, there have been countless efforts to make sense of that day: memoirs, books, movies, even a play opening in Los Angeles in April. The definitive account, however, will likely be Dave Cullen's Columbine, a nonfiction book that has the pacing of an action movie and the complexity of a Shakespearean drama... Cullen has a gift, if that's the right word, for excruciating detail. At times the language is so vivid you can almost smell the gunpowder and the fear... The Columbine killers were a strange and deeply disturbed pair, right out of a Truman Capote book. We've heard plenty of the details about Klebold and Harris—their fixation with the Nazis, their lust for violence, the homemade tapes in which they laid out their grand scheme for us to watch later—but Cullen, despite all odds, manages to humanize them... Cullen also debunks some of the biggest fallacies."

Awards

Columbine has won the following awards.
Columbine was a finalist for the following awards.
Columbine was named on many Best of 2009 lists, including these.
The Columbine paperback edition reveals details of four secret meetings involving all four parents of the killers. This unforeseen development provided the first real public insight into the mindsets of Wayne and Kathy Harris. The awkward encounters play out in the new "Afterword" added to the paperback. Further descriptions of the meetings with Wayne and Kathy Harris appear in The Daily Beast feature, "The Last Columbine Mystery," by the same author, published at the time of the paperback release.
The Afterword also includes updates about two bereaved parents and one wounded survivor of the Columbine shootings, and their starkly different perspectives on "forgiveness". The three individuals in question are Linda Mauser, Bob Curnow and Valeen Schnurr, respectively.
The expanded paperback edition of 2010 also adds scans from the killers' numerous journals, a diagram of the attack, and book club questions.

Use in schools

Columbine has been widely adopted as a textbook in high school English and Social Studies classes, as well as college journalism classes. The author created a free Columbine Teacher's Guide, as well as classroom videos and related material which have been widely downloaded from the internet. The guide includes units on teen depression, P.T.S.D. and overcoming adversity.
Several educational associations singled out the book for students and teachers. The American School Board Journal chose it as the "Top Education Book for 2009". It also called it "one of the best education books of the past 10 years." The American Library Association selected Columbine as a finalist for its "Alex Award for Young Adult Readers." In 2011, the Illinois School Library Media Association nominated Columbine for its "Abraham Lincoln Award: Illinois' High School Readers' Choice Award", which was open to student voting through February 2012.

Film and theater adaptation

The film rights to the book were acquired soon after the book's publication, by Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. The pair initially had the intention of turning the book into a feature film to be directed by David Fincher, but soon scrapped the idea of making a film about the shooting. Kennedy said about the decision, "We worried it would just be too difficult for people to look at."
The producers instead chose to adapt the book into a one-act play entitled The Library. The play was written by screenwriter Scott Z. Burns and directed by Steven Soderbergh. The original ensemble cast included Chloë Grace Moretz, Lili Taylor and Michael O'Keefe.

Reviews